From Sticker-Covered Desktop to Enterprise Server: My Homelab Journey
I've been writing code since high school — HTML and PHP for MySpace pages, believe it or not. Back then I had no idea that tinkering with servers and self-hosting would become such a core part of how I work. But here we are.
This is the story of how I went from a dusty old desktop covered in bad stickers to running a Dell PowerEdge 730XD in my home, and why I'd do it all over again.
It Started With Frustration
Like most things I build, the homelab didn't start with a grand plan. It started with two problems stacking up at the same time:
My MacBook was running out of space. And my Docker containers were eating my machine alive.
I was building SaaS apps and client projects, and the overhead of running dev environments, databases, and random services locally was grinding everything to a halt. Meanwhile, I kept paying for cloud services — storage, hosting, this, that — and every time I looked at my subscriptions I thought: I could just run this myself.
I always wanted to get into self-hosting. I just needed the right kick in the teeth to actually do it.
Phase One: The Frankenstein Desktop
My first homelab was a Lian Li desktop server — an old machine I had sitting around, absolutely covered in stickers from years of conference swag and general nerd energy. Not pretty.
I threw in a RAID array of whatever hard drives I had lying around, installed OpenCloud, got Plex running, and suddenly I had a place to store and stream my own data. It wasn't much, but it worked. More importantly, it taught me things. How storage works at a lower level. How networking inside a home setup actually behaves. How to debug something when it breaks at 11pm and you just want to watch a movie.
That janky tower was worth more as a learning tool than any course I could have taken.
Phase Two: Going Enterprise
At some point the old desktop hit its ceiling. More projects, more containers, more storage needs. Client work meant I needed proper staging environments — places where clients could actually log in and test software without me spinning up a VPS every time.
I picked up a Dell PowerEdge 730XD — maxed out specs, older hardware, but rock solid. Enterprise gear gets a bad rap for being overkill at home, but honestly? The reliability is the whole point. This thing runs 24/7 without complaint.
Proxmox went on it immediately. If you haven't used Proxmox for homelab work, it's hard to oversell how good it is for this use case. Full VM and LXC container management, a clean web UI, and it gets out of your way. I now run my personal projects, client staging environments, and services like Plex and n8n all as isolated containers on the same box.
What I Didn't Expect
I expected the homelab to save me money and give me more control. Both of those things happened.
What I didn't expect was how much it would sharpen my actual engineering skills.
When something breaks in a cloud environment, you file a ticket or read the docs. When something breaks in your homelab, you figure it out. Networking, storage, containerization, reverse proxies, TLS certs, backups — I've had to get my hands dirty with all of it. That knowledge shows up in my day job constantly.
There's also something genuinely satisfying about owning your stack. My data is mine. My uptime is my responsibility. It's more work, but it's the kind of work that actually teaches you something.
Where It's At Now
The 730XD is running strong. Beyond the personal site you're reading this on, I've got:
- Plex for movies, TV, and my entire audiobook library
- n8n for workflow automation (more on this in future posts)
- Proxmox LXCs for client staging environments
- PostgreSQL running the backend for this site
- Various dev environments that would have previously lived on my MacBook
Is it the flashiest setup? No. Is it exactly what I need? Absolutely.
Should You Build One?
If you're a developer who's tired of paying for services you could run yourself, or you just want a dedicated place to run your containers without nuking your laptop — yeah, you should.
Start small. Seriously. A used mini PC or an old desktop is fine. Get Proxmox on it, spin up a container, break something, fix it. The learning is in the doing.
The sticker-covered Lian Li was embarrassing to look at. I kind of miss it.